Chapter Nineteen
Louise
One look at her daughter’s ashen face when Roger appeared at dinner and Louise knew things were worse than she’d conjectured. And it filled her with an unending feeling of dread and doom, because Aimee—and her happiness—were all that she lived for.
Over her lifetime, Louise had heard parents lament that they could only be as happy as their least happy child. Louise imagined there was truth to that, as there was to most aphorisms passed down generation to generation, but she believed that if you had a child going through tough times, you would still experience pockets of joy from your other children. For Louise, everything hinged on Aimee. More so for her than Benny, even though she knew him to be a devoted and loving father. But Benny had the hotel, which functioned as something of another child—Aimee’s older brother, so to speak. He’d created it, nourished it, celebrated its successes, and mourned its failures. Louise loved the hotel, too, and felt a pride of ownership greeting the guests and singing her traditional anthem at the closing weekend; but the hotel was never the appendage to her that it was to Benny. She could return to their apartment in Manhattan and put it out of her mind for weeks at a time, but never did she stop thinking about Aimee. Aimee’s face, and the faces of her grandchildren, were the first thing she saw when she woke up in the morning and what she imagined as she drifted off to sleep.
What had Roger done to her daughter? She would kill him for hurting her baby.
The only silver lining of Roger showing up was that it took the heat off Michael, who looked far more like an eight-year-old caught with his hand in the cookie jar than the scholar who had been admitted to all eight of the Ivy League schools. Fanny made sure everyone who passed through the Golden’s threshold knew that detail, along with the fact that Michael was a Presidential Scholar, a National Merit Finalist, and a master-level chess player. Louise had always found it terribly tacky of the Weingolds to go around bragging about their grandchildren, which was another thing that had come up the night of the ugly Fourth of July barbeque. She hadn’t meant to say “We all know that, Fanny” quite so emphatically when it was repeated for the tenth time that Michael had earned a 1600 on the SATs. “Fanny is just very proud, Louise,” Amos had said, making her feel like a small child being scolded.
Louise was also tremendously proud of Aimee and her grandchildren. Her daughter was a kind person, putting others before herself to the point that she ran herself ragged trying to care for her family. While she sometimes couldn’t help chiding Aimee for not wearing enough makeup or taking the time to pull together a flattering outfit, she admired that she wasn’t caught up in superficial pursuits. But Louise knew better than to brag about it, which would only invite the evil eye anyway. Though based on the tension at last night’s dinner, it seemed the evil eye might already have found the Glasser family. Louise would get to the bottom of it. She needed to.
She found Aimee eating breakfast alone the next morning.
“Your hair!” Louise gasped. Her daughter’s curls had miraculously unwound, and she was sporting a chin-length bob.
Aimee cupped her newly shorn hair. She had to have chopped at least six inches. Louise wouldn’t have thought her fuller face could take it, but it was extremely flattering.
“It turns out the Catskills are not totally without style,” Aimee said. “I found a salon in Livingston Manor that opens early, and they saved me. Do you like it?”
“I love it,” Louise said. She eyed the chair opposite Aimee. “Join you?”
“Sure,” Aimee said.
Louise cleared her throat and pushed away the croissant Aimee put on her plate.
“Darling, I want to know what’s going on. You looked like a ghost when your husband showed up. I know you’re a grown woman and you don’t have to tell me, but you might feel better if you do.”
Aimee seemed to consider what she’d said. She could hardly be surprised at the inquiry. Even the waiters had sensed trouble last night and stayed away, as though their table had an electric fence around it.
Finally, Aimee nodded and whispered, “I’ll tell you.”
Louise breathed a sigh of relief.
Growing older was no picnic, but there were perks to the mother-daughter relationship maturing to the point where Aimee didn’t immediately get defensive over everything Louise said, and Louise could turn to Aimee for advice as well. Louise could recall the exact turning point. It was August 1995, and the summer had been a relatively smooth one. Benny and Amos had staffed the place to the point that Louise’s usual roles were quietly being usurped by paid employees. She’d gone to check on the menu, but there was now a “cuisine supervisor.” She’d supervised the pool area to see that the towels were rolled into tight cylinders, but suddenly there was a “cabana captain” overseeing that. Louise had had all this free time materialize, and the prospect of an empty day had terrified her. She’d thought, with a modest degree of apprehension, that she should join the ladies card tables. But when she’d approached Fanny and her fearsome foursome to inquire about subbing into their canasta games, they’d exchanged quiet glances that told her everything she needed to know.
One of Fanny’s cronies had cobbled together some excuse about how difficult it was to learn canasta (“So many rules! And they make no sense!”), as if Louise had been a birdbrain. She’d been the one who’d found out about the estate sale three towns over, where the hotel had picked up stunning display china. She’d figured out that by tracking where the big entertainers were performing in the area, she could invite them for the next day and avoid paying for their travel. Now she was supposed to buy some flimsy excuse that she couldn’t pick up the rules of a card game? Dejected, she’d turned to Aimee, her pigtailed child who was now someone’s wife. Aimee had said exactly what she’d needed to hear. That Fanny and her friends were just intimidated by Louise. She was chicer, more urbane, the darling of the hotel. Next to Louise, they’d feel frumpy and unaccomplished. From that point on, Louise frequently turned to her daughter. Had she done that to the exclusion of helping Aimee?
“But first let me ask you something,” Aimee now said. “You were awfully chummy with Fanny yesterday. I didn’t think she was your cup of tea.”
“It’s true, Fanny has never been my favorite. I think we both envied each other. She envied me for the reasons you and I both know. And I—”
“Yes?” Aimee said, leaning in closely. Her daughter’s face was awash in surprise, thinking, What could she possibly envy about Fanny? Louise took a deep breath. She’d never spoken about this out loud to anyone but Benny and her own mother.
“I wanted more children. Now, Aimee, I never want you to think you weren’t enough for me. I feel like the luckiest mother in the world to have you. But after everything I went through—years of infertility—seeing Fanny pop out two beautiful boys in one beat, it just unhinged me.”
Aimee dropped her scone.
“What are you talking about? Whenever anyone at the hotel asked you about whether you wanted more children, you said, ‘And risk losing this figure?’”
Louise was horrified. Had her child really believed that? What else had she overheard and not understood to be the way of adults speaking without saying the truth? She took Aimee’s hand in her own. Her daughter was still wearing her wedding ring.
“Darling, I had three miscarriages before you, and five after.” She didn’t want to tear up and pile on to whatever Aimee was managing, which was clearly a far fresher wound than the disappointment of Louise’s womb from decades ago. Nor did she want to risk opening up the spigot any more. Who knew what else would come tumbling out?
“I had no idea,” Aimee said. “I’m so sorry.”
“You’ve given me three incredible grandchildren. I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
“There’s so much we don’t know about each other, isn’t there? Even though we’ve basically been trapped together at this hotel every summer since the dawn of time,” Aimee said.
That was truer than her daughter realized.
“Goodness, did you feel trapped? I never thought that. To answer your question, Fanny and I were kidding around about Zach and Phoebe being an item,” Louise said. It had shocked her how much pleasure she derived from seeing them together. A Weingold and a Goldman romantically involved. There was a certain inevitability to it.
“Now my turn. Tell me about Roger. And why Zach looks like the cat that swallowed the canary. My vision may be shot, but trust me, I still see things,” Louise said. “That’s another thing Fanny and I spoke about. She said even with Amos’s macular degeneration and her floaters, it’s like we can see things more clearly than ever. Metaphorically speaking, of course.”
“You sure you want to hear?” Aimee said. “It’s upsetting, and you have enough to deal with.”
Louise nodded, willing her face to stay calm. Inside, she was trembling, but she needed to remain strong and composed for her daughter. It was like at Benny’s funeral. The more Aimee had cried, the less Louise had. It was only in private moments she’d allowed herself to fully break down.
“Roger’s been prescribing opioids in massive quantities. It’s been going on for at least a decade, and I had no idea. I don’t know if the pharmaceutical company courted him or whether he sought them out, but basically he’s a pill pusher. They call him a ‘whale,’ because he makes so much money for them. And the company that makes the pills has been giving him huge bonuses, free vacations, even our cars.”
Louise felt the ground fall out from underneath her. If she was hooked up to an EKG machine, the peaks would be off the charts. Roger? Her doctor son-in-law was a drug dealer? She’d seen a harrowing 60 Minutes on those horrible doctors that preyed on people’s addictions to enrich themselves. The show had scared her so much that she’d refused Percocet after her knee replacement.
“Please don’t say I told you so,” Aimee said.
Aimee used to say that Louise didn’t approve of Roger, but that had never been the case. There was even a brief period where she’d thought Roger might be like another child to her, though quickly she’d realized the phrase “in-law” was part of the familial description so that you were reminded the person wasn’t your flesh and blood; that a judge could dissolve the relationship with a signature. If she hadn’t been as effusive as she should have been when Aimee had announced her engagement and the wedding plans had begun, it was because losing her daughter to marriage had been painful. She’d known Aimee would still make time for her, but it would never be the same. And as for Roger not being good enough? Well, no man was good enough for her daughter as far as she was concerned. Hotel guests joked about the Jewish mothers not thinking any of the young ladies were good enough for their perfect sons; well, Louise Goldman didn’t see why it shouldn’t cut both ways. Which raised some red flags about Maddie. Her granddaughter was awfully concerned about pleasing her boyfriend and his family, when really they should be courting her. Their son was marrying into a legendary family. It was why Aimee had hyphenated her name, even though Goldman-Glasser was a mouthful. When you introduced yourself with the Goldman name in certain places, it wasn’t uncommon to be asked: Are you the Goldman Sachs Goldmans? The Levi Strauss Goldmans? Or the Catskills Goldmans? When they affirmed they were the Goldmans of the Golden, there was an outpouring of reverence.
Oh my God. Where was her head? Aimee was still talking.
“And now he needs money to pay legal fees. Which is why he was so pushy about selling the hotel last night,” she was saying.
“What do you think?” Louise said, because it was easier to ask questions than to say anything substantive at this point.
“I think it’s not fair to sell the hotel to keep my criminal husband out of jail. It’s not fair to me and the kids, but it’s also not fair to the Weingolds. This isn’t their problem. On the other hand, the idea of having to see my children go through a metal detector to visit their father—it turns my stomach. But it’s not like the money will guarantee he doesn’t go to jail. I don’t know what to do.”
Louise’s ache for her daughter was a throbbing in her chest that felt like a heart attack. What she would do for a return to the days when fixing Aimee’s problems was as simple as slapping a Band-Aid on a scrape and taking her to the toy store. The worst part of adulthood wasn’t a creaky back or financial worries. It was facing problems for which there was no good answer, only the lesser of evils.
“And Zach? He knows?”
“No, but he was home when the police raided our house. So he’s definitely worried something terrible is happening, though thankfully his obsession with Phoebe has distracted him. And the hotel business. I’ve never seen him so motivated and engaged. Silver linings, right?”
“Golden linings,” Louise corrected. “Remember how Daddy used to say that? When something bad would happen at the hotel, he used to say, ‘We need to find the golden lining.’ Sometimes that’s all we can do.”
“True. Well, now you know my secret. It feels good to unburden myself,” Aimee said.
Louise nodded as she thought: Some secrets are meant to stay that way forever.
The year was 1967. It was the Summer of Love on the West Coast, but at the Golden Hotel, it was the summer of Louise’s anguish. She had had her third miscarriage, this time during opening weekend of the hotel. While it seemed like every other woman on property was pushing a pram or setting up baby blankets on the lawn, Louise was lying in bed with heavy sanitary napkins in her underwear. It had happened again. She knew the telltale signs the minute the cramps started.
“Take it easy,” Benny said, kissing her on the forehead. “You call Larry if you need anything. And I promise, we will figure out what’s wrong. We’ll call Dr. Hamburger first thing Tuesday morning.” He slipped into a linen sports coat and blew her another kiss from the doorway of their cottage. When he was gone, Louise let the tears go. Dr. Hamburger was her gynecologist. But what if the problem was with Benny? She tried to suggest as much many times, but he turned a deaf ear. Her mother urged her not to push it. “You can’t attack his manhood,” she said strongly.
By Sunday morning, Louise felt well enough to be out and about. She couldn’t spend the entire weekend out of sight, or the rumors would be vicious.
“Hi, Louise,” said Emily Fetcher, crossing the lawn with a baby in smocking perched on her hip. “The pickle man is here!” She gestured toward a cart set up near the flagpole. The ladies loved the black-haired, green-eyed pickle man most of all the vendors. Victor Cardino was by far the handsomest of all the men who came to peddle their goods, and he was a terrible flirt. “I’ll take his pickle any day,” the ladies would giggle, buying more pickles than anyone could safely consume.
“Did you know Victor has six children?” Emily said, linking an arm through Louise’s. “I guess if I was Mrs. Cardino, I wouldn’t mind getting on my back, either.”
Six children? Louise went goggle-eyed. She hadn’t known that about him. Victor was so young. How did he support such a big family selling pickles? Louise accompanied Emily to buy two pounds of half-sours. She couldn’t get Victor and the image of his family out of her mind for the rest of the day.
A month passed, and Dr. Hamburger was kind enough to drive up to the hotel to examine Louise. Once again, he said everything checked out. “It’ll happen for you,” he said to Louise, as if Benny had nothing to do with the equation. Phil Hamburger was a golfing buddy of Benny’s. Louise sensed the doctor treading cautiously.
“Got any dills?” Louise asked Victor the morning after the doctor’s visit. She specifically sought out the pickle man while he was still setting up for the day and the guests were still finishing breakfast.
“Of course. And the most delicious butter pickles you ever tasted,” Victor said. “Care to sample, Mrs. Goldman?”
Mrs. Goldman. Mrs. Goldman. Mrs. Goldman.
“Louise, please. Can I see inside your booth?” She gestured to the open door of his U-Haul.
“Sure,” he said, looking confused.
When they were inside, Louise took a deep breath. It smelled strongly of brine. She could do this. She could. Louise pressed her lips to Victor’s and slipped a hand into his jeans. Victor unbuckled his belt.
“We’re going to do this once, Victor,” Louise said. “And then you’re not going to come back to the Golden Hotel ever again. You will sell your pickles elsewhere.” She handed him a thousand dollars in cash. “This is to make up for lost wages.” Victor was breathing hard in her ear, lost income the farthest thing from his mind.
Nine months later, Aimee was born. Louise slept with Benny at least ten times for the one time she was with Victor. Victor was tan; Aimee was pale. Benny had stubby fingers; so did Aimee. Victor wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed; Aimee was clever like Benny. But that cleft chin . . . Aimee’s artistic talent . . . Where, oh where did those come from?